All the entries on chromasia are placed into one of seven primary categories: six to reflect the aspect ratio of the image, and the seventh to indicate that an image isn’t available as a print. Additionally, each photograph may be assigned to one of more additional categories or subcategories, e.g. my travel category, children category, and so on.

about the ‘self-portrait’ category

Shots in the 'self-portrait' category are straight shots, reflections and fragments of me.

Here's my first shot for 2010, taken back in November when I was in Dubai – a shot of an old bicycle down at the Souk. In this instance the post-processing was reasonably straightforward other than that I combined two similar shots of the same subject to construct the final image: one for the main detail, and another to lighten and add texture to the background. If you're interested, both shots are here:

As I mentioned in my last post I've writing a new book, which is now finished, so it shouldn't be too long until I find some time to shoot some new material. In the short-term though I'm slightly hampered as Libby is currently back in the UK and I have all four of the younger kids and one of the older ones. I should be able to find some time - in between referring, cooking, shopping, and so on, but it's likely to be limited.

I'm also slightly hampered by the fact that my 1Ds Mark II is broken (though I still have my 5D). I was shooting some material for the book, on 1st and 2nd curtain sync, and the shutter broke. If you take a look at the following url you will see that one of the shutter blades has become detached:

In other words, it's going to need a new shutter which I'll sort out next time I'm back in the UK. In the meanwhile though Libby is picking up a Canon 5D Mark II which she'll bring back next weekend. I've thought about getting one for ages, but haven't been able to justify the expense, so thought this would be as good a time as any :)

All of which leaves us with this image. It was constructed with MacOSaiX, from 1600 of the 1644 images that have been posted on chromasia, and used a portrait of me as the base image. The portrait was shot by my good friend Bobbi Lane, and is the one I use for my profile pic on Facebook and Twitter.

At this resolution it's a bit difficult to tell what you're looking at, so I've posted a bigger version here:

If you do take a look, it will take some time to load as it's 3000px square and 2.8MB. The base image is included at the bottom-right of the mosaic. I can't imagine that this is a technique I'll be repeating, but it was fun to put this one together.

On an unrelated matter: my good friend Adam Swords has just launched his new website. If you haven't already done so, take a look:

Ok, so this one's a bit silly, but I don't have any new material, and after playing around with the avatar generator on the Simpsons Movie website I couldn't resist putting this together. I created the avatar of me (which is frighteningly realistic:-)) and Milly did one of her. I did try to convince Libby to do one too, but couldn't persuade her to have a go ;-)

And not that it makes a great deal of difference, but this one looks much better with the black theme.

I'm hoping to shoot some new material over the weekend, which should be a bit less frivolous than this effort, but probably won't be posting much until the week commencing the 23rd (after which I'll have a lot more free time).

In the meanwhile, you might want to check out my Curves tutorial (on tonal range and the Curves tool), which is now finished! Let me know what you think.

If you'd like to be kept informed about what's going on with the tutorials you can subscribe to the tutorials news feed (in RSS 2 format) which is linked from the main online tutorials page. This will be updated each time we release a new tutorial. The next one will be one of the subscription based tutorials, and will be released by mid August.

Anyway, enough of all that, as I'm sure you're itching to head over to the Simpsons Movie website and create some avatars ;-)

Update: I'm away until the 23rd of this month, and won't have access to the internet, so I'm afraid that you'll have to put up with this one for a while longer. When I do get back, I should have a reasonable amount of new material, and will put something else up asap. In the meanwhile, I'll see you all soon.

It's been a long week, during which I've felt the need to prop my eyes open with matchsticks on several occasions, of which this shot is an example (minus the matchsticks) ;-)

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the post-processing: I used the channel mixer to 'extract' the blue channel (which radically darkens skin tones), added a vignette, and increased the contrast with the Curves tool.

I helped out a friend today shooting a wedding, and thoroughly enjoyed myself – it was way less stressful than doing it on my own – but this was the only one I found time to take for myself. It's not the best of shots, but it does mark the occasion :-)

I was going to go out again this evening and re-shoot a couple of the shots that I took last night that didn't quite work out, but it's cold, I only had four hours sleep, and I felt like a change. Add to which that my wife was quite happy to be photographed this evening, and this is the result.

I should probably take more shots of my wife, but our littlest (two in February) still stays up till about 11pm, so we often don't have too much time to ourselves. Tonight though she went down at about 8.30. I suspect that she'll make up for it tomorrow by staying awake till two in the morning ;-)

I haven't been taking part in all the recent Photo Friday challenges but I could hardly miss this one – Reflections.

As for this shot: I tried a version of this one yesterday with our existing decorations which, because they're made out of shatterproof plastic (i.e. they're two and three year old resistant), didn't reflect the scene all that well. So I went out this afternoon to look for a single, large glass decoration ... and couldn't find one. However, I did find these small ones and think the photograph is probably more interesting as a result. So, a festive take on this week's theme which I'm actually quite pleased with :-)

Here's a companion shot to yesterday's entry that better contextualises the blue square that confused people yesterday. There are a few things I like about this shot but my favourite is the rather disdainful "I'd ask you what the hell you're doing if only I could be bothered" look ;-)

Other than the fact that this was taken some time around the 15th of July with my G5 there isn't a great deal I can tell you about this shot as I no longer have the RAW file. As for why I'm putting it up: three reasons.
First: this week's Photo Friday challenge is Family, and with four wonderful children and a beautiful wife you'd have thought that I'd have been able to come up with something. But, what with one thing and another, and despite shooting over a hundred shots earlier this evening, it just didn't happen.
Second: I've recently been clearing out some old files and came across this one. I'd already deleted the RAW file (note to self: buy new hard drive!) so probably didn't intend to use it, but decided that I now quite like it. It's probably fairly obvious, but in case it isnt', this is a shot of the LCD screen for a video recorder (the one in this shot).
Third: I've run out of stuff again. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with something tomorrow as I find it much more relaxing when I manage to get a few shots ahead of myself.

I have a couple of other shots that are not too dissimilar to yesterday's entry, but I fancied a change today.

As for this shot: unlike the previous few, this is an attempt to capture the dullness of this season rather than its drama – looking out (in this instance, from St. Annes pier) onto a dull, grey day.

Oh, and my apologies for not responding in any detail to the many wonderful comments on yesterday's shot. The cold I had for a couple of weeks has now transferred itself to my wife and our youngest, both of whom are quite unwell.

I don't know what it is, but there's something about this shot that I'm not happy with. I like the colours, and the composition, and the twin shadows, but something about it, IMO, just isn't quite right (and the only reason I've put it up is because I don't have anything else today).

The bad news is that there's no news on my G5 – whatsoever; I took loads of shots with my FujiFilm FinePix over the weekend – and they're all crap; and the company I ordered my 20D from did have a delivery – but instead of the 25 or so cameras they were expecting they only got three. So I'm not overly delighted.
The good news, maybe, is that I found another company who have assured me that they're getting a consignment of 20D's tomorrow, and I can have one of them. Hmmm ... I'm not going to hold my breath though as I know that they're in short supply and all the shops I've spoken to have had deliveries of far fewer units than they expected. We'll see.
Anyway, the upshot of the above is that I've been archive raiding again. I took this at the same time as this shot, but didn't post it at the time as I thought it was a little too similar to put up. I haven't put up the EXIF data as, rather foolishly, I deleted the RAW file a couple of days ago. Things are not quite going as planned at the moment ;-)

On Friday, when I said it was about time for a change, I didn't mean that the fates should conspire against me such that I'd drop and wreck my camera; oh well, I guess I should be more careful about what I wish for ;-)

Anyway, I was going to take a more protracted break, but not posting for the last two days has been entirely weird so I thought I'd revert to using my old FujiFilm FinePix 40i in the interim. For those of you not familiar with that model, it's a fixed focal length, 2.4MP (interpolated to 4.3MP), point-and-shoot. I strongly suspect that I'm not going to be able to come up with anything too good with it, but I thought I'd try and work with it for a while until I either get a new camera or my G5 comes back from being repaired. I don't imagine that I'll be posting every day for the next week or so, nor that the stuff I do put up will be all that great, but you never know – I'll see what I can do.

Oh, and thanks for all the kind words on Friday's photograph, they were much appreciated.

This was shot in the rightmost window of this shot, and it's about my 30th attempt to get this one right. About 50% of the ones I've taken have been fine – at full resolution – but the rest that I've taken ended up either losing detail or appearing over-sharpened. Anyway, I'm reasonably happy with this one, and unless I find a better way of resizing (rather than using Web Presenter Pro) I don't think I'll be able to do much better.